The Incredible Saga of West Side Story

It almost died on a street corner in New York City.

One humid midsummer afternoon in 1957, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, composer Leonard Bernstein, choreographer Jerome Robbins and writer Arthur Laurents stood dejected at 44th Street and Sixth Avenue, contemplating the death of their artistic vision, a collaboration titled West Side Story. Following a bomb of an audition for potential backers, the quartet had just been informed that the money behind the show—scheduled to begin rehearsals in six weeks—was pulling out, that there was no place in New York for a tragic musical tale set on its very streets. The men, an artist’s palette of the city’s greatest creative talents, did what anyone else would have done at that moment: head for the bar.

They couldn’t get served because Laurents wasn’t wearing a tie.

Prologue
West Side Story was born eight years before that day when Robbins, then at New York City Ballet, approached Bernstein and Laurents, then a California-based screenwriter, about creating a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. The premise was simple: the Montagues would be Catholic, the Capulets Jewish; their tragic story would play out during Passover in the Lower East Side. The trio was enthusiastic—Laurents would have his much-desired chance to write a book of a musical, while Bernstein, riding high on the success of On the Town, could bring his lush, operatic sensibility back to the theatrical stage. As Laurents would later describe in his memoir Original Story, the three sought to transcend traditional musical theater. This would be something highbrow yet distinctly American: “Lyric Theatre.”

The enthusiasm was short-lived. With Laurents working from Hollywood, the long-distance collaboration lost momentum even as he wrote the outline. When the scribe discovered a dusty, forgotten play called Abie’s Irish Rose, essentially their Catholic-Jewish story already written, he bowed out of the project entirely. Robbins, notorious for his flash-bomb temper, took the news uncharacteristically well—mainly because he was bowing out, too. With all parties amiably retreating, the tentatively titled East Side Story was shelved.

Eight years later, Bernstein found himself lounging at the Chateau Marmont’s pool in Hollywood with Laurents. The composer was in town to conduct at the Hollywood Bowl, while Laurents was holed up working on a movie script. There, legs dangling in the pool while a who’s who of Tinsel Town lounged in cabanas, the pair began discussing their forgotten brainchild, affectionately called "Romeo." The conversation swung to the morning’s headlines—violence between rival gangs, juvenile delinquency among “Chicanos.”

“We could set it here,” Laurents recalled Bernstein saying, meaning California. The Brooklyn-born and raised writer admitted he knew nothing about Latinos in Hollywood, but knew the racially diverse, youthfully charged streets of New York all too well. And there it was: "Romeo" was headed for the West Side.

Putting It Together
At a party several months later, a rising star and protégé of Oscar Hammerstein approached Laurents and asked who was writing the lyrics for the rumored West Side Story. According to Laurents, he hit himself in the forehead, looked at the inquirer—a young Stephen Sondheim—and said, “Why didn’t I think of you?” Sondheim reluctantly he wasn’t accustomed to collaboration and wanted his own complete score on Broadway, not just lyrics met with Bernstein shortly thereafter, and the pair hit it off. WSS’s trio had officially expanded to a quartet.

The team worked together easily. Laurents dissected Shakespeare’s classic, streamlining the plot and inserting street vernacular to indicate the youthful arrogance of the modern-day turf war. Bernstein wrote musical sketches based on Laurents’ work, with Sondheim writing lyrics as each scene was finished, rather than once the entire score was composed. The usual disputes broke out—Laurents, for example, argued for the “Gee, Officer Krupke” number, saying the third act needed comic relief; the others worried that the number would break the tension. Laurents won by invoking Shakespeare, the porter scene in Macbeth specifically. Songs were reworked at Robbins’ request, or shifted to other places in the show “One Hand, One Heart” swapped places with “Tonight, Tonight” before opening. But all things considered, the creative process was smooth, four geniuses stitching together a single concept.

A Bump in the Road
The finished piece, despite all the trimmings, was a hard sell, immediately criticized by potential backers for a myriad of reasons: The show either too “depressing” to too operatic, or both, and its leading players mostly wound up dead. Every producer in Manhattan said “no.”

Following their midsummer afternoon’s rejection, Sondheim called a longtime friend and mentor, director and producer Hal Prince, mostly to curse the death of his latest project. Prince, having already rejected WSS once himself, must have been seized by morbid curiosity, and asked Sondheim to mail him the show’s book. Though few revisions had been made, Prince was swayed, and he and Robert Griffith committed themselves as producers. The show’s momentum rocketed forward, fund-raising flying, buzz swirling, until one horrific announcement: Jerome Robbins didn’t want to choreograph the show. He would direct, but wanted nothing to do with the dancing cue the sound of tires screeching to a halt.

Prince, fortunately, persuaded Robbins using a brilliant, two-pronged argument, saying that 1 Robbins was the only one talented enough to do it, and 2 he wouldn’t produce without him. Robbins blew a gasket, made a list of demands that were mostly met, then relented. It would not be the last bump the creatives would hit.

Just Like Romeo and Juliet
In Robbins’ mind, West Side Story needed to be revolutionary on all fronts, including technical. He enlisted set designer Oliver Smith to create an abstract urban jungle, foregoing the traditional drop curtain that hides scene changes to make transitions a part of the action. Groundbreaking lighting designer Jean Rosenthal was tapped next, followed by Academy Award-winning costumer Irene Sharaff who was ahead of the current designer denim trend by about 40 years, hand-dying jeans at $75 a pop for each cast member. Robbins also demanded a convincingly youthful cast that reflected the real city outside the theater, one comprised entirely of triple-threats. The director scoured the talent pools, resulting in a six-month talent search with grueling multiple callbacks.

During auditions, Chicago-native Carol Lawrence rose to the top of the “Maria” pool her one misstep early on was covering herself in jewelry and makeup in order to appear more ethnic. Robbins made her shower and change before allowing her to audition. The primary choice for her Romeo was Larry Kert, previously rejected for the roles of Bernardo and Riff but possessed of a voice sweet enough for Tony. As Lawrence recalls in Amanda Vaill’s Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, their dual audition together was kismet.

Called in front of the full creative team, Robbins ordered Kert off the bare stage, then commanded Lawrence: “get lost on the stage somewhere, so he can’t see you. I’m going to bring him in and let him do ‘Maria.’ After that, if he can find you, do the balcony scene. If he can’t find you—you don’t have an audition.” Lawrence panicked, then found a rusty ladder set into the back wall and crouched there, hiding. When Kert returned he was told to sing and then find his girl. Lawrence recounted:

“He whipped around and saw me, and his eyes got so big—in two leaps he was at the wall and became Spider Man…I reached over and grabbed him and pulled him onto the balcony…we did the whole scene; at the end he jumped down, and you could hear a pin drop in the theater. [Bernstein] walked down to the front, and he said ‘That is the most mesmerizing audition I’ve ever seen in my life.’”

The pair were cast as Maria and Tony.

Working With a Master
Rounding out the production was Ken Le Roy as Bernardo, Chita Rivera as Anita, Mickey Calin as Riff, and a host of relative unknowns about to make theatrical history. They enjoyed an eight-week rehearsal process, then unheard of and needed, as there was no “chorus” and each cast member was staged as a fully realized character, during which Robbins crafted more dancing than had ever appeared on a Broadway stage during a single show.

The demanding director fueled the work environment with his own flourishes—Jets and Sharks were forbidden to associate with one another to build tension between the groups, and Robbins posted articles about gang violence on the callboard with things like “This Is Your Life” written across the top. And, always, the director, cigarette in hand, wanted more. In the scene following the death of Bernardo, Lawrence was instructed to hit her lover in a fit of grief and rage. Robbins, unsatisfied with the action, pushed Lawrence until the actress attacked her scene partner so violently she cracked one of Kert’s ribs.

The payoff for this attention to detail would be worth it.

A Place for Us
West Side Story made its out of town debut in Washington, D.C. in August 1957. The show sold out, repeating its success so substantially in the subsequent Philadelphia tryout that police were called to keep order outside the box office. But while the Broadway-bound show drummed up interest, dark clouds gathered over its creators.

Sondheim, overshadowed by Bernstein’s name, wasn’t mentioned in the reviews this didn’t entirely bother the lyricist, unsatisfied with his finished product: “I'm not happy about all of it, especially my own stuff… I cringe when I hear Maria use drawing-room words like ‘alarming’ [in "I Feel Pretty"] and Tony wax poetic with lines like ‘Today the world was just an address,’” he would write years later, prompting Bernstein to remove his name as co-lyricist. The quartet was also shaken when the director took on a “conceived by” credit that splashed across posters and programs. By opening night, Robbins’ partners were barely speaking to him.

West Side Story hit Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre on September 26, 1957. The opening night audience was dumbfounded; by the final curtain, ticketholders were sobbing. Reviews were positive: “profoundly moving show,” the Times wrote; “a juke-box Manhattan opera” the Daily News proclaimed; “Robbins has put together…the most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we’ve been exposed to in a dozen seasons” the Tribune outright gushed. Absent, unfortunately, from almost all reviews was mention of the rest of the creative team’s contributions.

Slights aside, the production was a hit, garnering six Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical losing to The Music Man, though Robbins won for choreography. The original transferred twice, from the Winter Garden to the Broadway Theatre and then back again, playing 732 performances before closing on June 27, 1959. A return engagement opened less than a year later on April 27, 1960, transferring to the Alvin Theatre and playing 249 performances. Two more revivals would follow, one at City Center in 1964 and the other at the Minskoff in 1980, featuring Ken Marshall as Tony, Josie de Guzman as Maria and Debbie Allien as Anita.

Big Screen Validation
More prominent than any revival, however, was the film. Released in 1961, the screen adaptation was directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins and starred Hollywood darling Natalie Wood as Maria, Richard Beymer as Tony Elvis famously turned the role down, George Chakiris as Bernardo and Rita Moreno as Anita; the casting caused a controversy, as many original cast members felt slighted at being deemed “too old” to reprise their roles.

Though produced mainly in Los Angeles, the film’s iconic opening sequence was shot on the streets of New York. The creative team made various changes in adapting their story for screen, changing bad language, swapping the placement of “Cool” and “Officer Krupke” and turning “America” into a full production number using all of the Sharks, among others.

Where the Broadway production had been snubbed by the Tony Awards, the Academy Awards vindicated the show: West Side Story won 10 statues total, including for Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress, was deemed “culturally significant’ by the United States Library of Congress and was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 1997.

Laurents, for the record, is not a fan of the film: “Bogus accents, bogus dialect, bogus costumes. I think it’s also terribly acted,” he told The New York Times recently.

Something’s Coming
Fifty years after its debut, WSS has rarely been out of view. The show is a staple on the seasonal lineups of professional and community theaters, as well as opera houses, has enjoyed productions in major cities like Paris and Milan and continues to tour globally. On the curriculum of nearly every history of musical theater class in the country, it is widely considered one of the great landmarks of the genre.

In his memoir, Laurents directly addresses how the show left its impression: “If West Side Story influenced the musical theatre, it was in content, not form. Serious subjects—bigotry, race, rape, murder, death—were dealt with for the first time in a musical and as seriously a they would be in a play. That was innovative; style and technique were not.”

And Laurents, now 90 years old and at the helm of the 2009 revival opening at the Broadway Theater on March 19, isn’t done innovating. At the suggestion of his late partner, Tom Hatcher, inspired by a Spanish-language production in Bogota, the newest presentation of WSS will be bilingual, with Latino characters speaking much of the dialogue in their native tongue. Tony Award winner Lin-Manuel Miranda of In the Heights took on the challenge of translating the lyrics, working with Sondheim to present literal, but not word-for-word, versions of the show’s famed songs, including “America” and “A Boy Like That.” Laurents aims for a grittier, edgier production than the original, with both gangs shirking “Broadway” stereotypes to come closer to the reality of street teens violently protecting their turf.

Assisting Laurents is choreographer Joey McKneely, who worked under Robbins and has recreated his steps for multiple WSS productions across the globe, instructing a cast featuring Broadway veterans like Matt Cavenaugh and Karen Olivo and unknowns like Argentinean Josefina Scaglione plucked from obscurity to play Maria and Venezuelan-born George Akram as Bernardo.

Because of the overwhelming popularity of the show, the revival, even with Laurents involved, has big expectations to meet. Fortunately, the material itself was crafted to make a lasting impression, one that should thrill longtime fans and a new generation of theatergoers alike. As Brooks Atkinson wrote in 1957: “The subject is not beautiful. But what West Side Story draws out of it is beautiful, for it has a searching point of view.”